Nelly Yusupova, helping pave the way for women in IT

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This past July, I had the pleasure of meeting Nelly Yusupova, founder of DigitalWoman.com and CTO of Webgrrls International. Nelly was a speaker at the BlogHer 2007 conference, facilitating a session called "Getting Custom: What Web Designers Know, Taking Your Blog to the Next Level (A Lab Segment)." Since Nelly was instructing beginning bloggers about how to start a Typepad blog, I didn't actually sit in on her session, but I did get a chance to talk her during a few of the other BlogHer events.

In my hotel room, I spent some time reading about the female BlogHer 2007 speakers in the main booklet that was passed out on Day One. Here's what it says about Nelly:

Nelly Yusupova is the CTO of Webgrrls International, the Founder of DigitalWoman.com, and the Chapter Leader of New York City Webgrrls. She is an Internet expert and strategist and is a Wall Street Journal "Woman on the IT fast track." She has been featured as a tech expert on NBC's Today Show, in INC Magazine, in Newsday and is an industry speaker about careers in technology, building community, and the power of networking. She earned her BS in computer science and is fluent in PHP, MySQL, Java, ASP, JSP, Oracle, Perl/CGI, HTML, JavaScript, UNIX scripting, Telnet, FTP, and UNIX.

Since the dust has settled from BlogHer 2007, I finally caught up with Nelly for a podcast opportunity so that the TechRepublic community could learn a little bit about Webgrrls, DigitalWoman.com, and Nelly's take on a few questions related to programming and IT. Even if you're not a female working in IT, I'm sure that you'll be able to appreciate Nelly's constant drive to educate herself and others, as well as her candid answers to the rapid-fire questions I threw her way at the end.